The Sisters Brothers | Bouquets & Brickbats

11/12/24

Netflix

Jacques Audiard has always been an interesting and experimentlal writer/director, seeming to choose his projects at random and rarely sticking to a particular genre, throughout a career that began back in the early 90s. Emilia Pérez deals with the kind of subject matter that would frighten off many respected filmmakers. It’s a bizarre soap opera/fable about crime cartels, gender reassignment and the plight of ‘The Disappeared,’ the millions of people murdered by Mexican cartels.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s also a musical?

Audiard throws himself headlong into the process with his usual glee and the upshot is that the film is being garlanded with nominations for all the big movie awards – and this at a time when many veteran directors are struggling to get their new projects even funded. If the object of the exercise is to get yourself noticed, Audiard is finally doing it big time. (His last film, The Sisters Brothers, an intriguing offbeat western, came and went with barely a ripple.)

Rita (Zoe Saldana) is an under-appreciated Mexican lawyer, who spends most of her time penning eloquent pleas to get the guilty off the hook. Out of the blue, she is contacted by notorious crime cartel boss. Manitas del Monte (played by trans actor, Karlas Sofia Gascón), a man so steeped in violence he now feels he has only one way of escaping an inevitable fate. He has always longed to be a woman, and wants Rita to secretly arrange gender reassignment for him. In return, he will make her fabulously wealthy and she can choose whatever future she wishes for herself. But Manitas will have to fake his own death and his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and his two young boys can know nothing of their father’s new life.

Four years later, Rita meets Manitas again, but now she’s the titular Emilia, looking to reconnect with her wife and children by posing as the cousin they never knew they had. What’s more, Emilia wishes to atone for all the killing she instigated when she was Manitas…

Is Emilia Pérez a good film? Well, for me it has flashes of brilliance, but there are also some sizeable missteps. The songs, composed by Clément Ducol and Camille range from upbeat dance tunes to quirky half-spoken, half-sung observations about anatomy that sometimes veer close to the absurd. While these serve to highlight the fairytale unreality of the piece, the constant shifting of tone makes the film feel uneven. The ‘Mexican’ locations are pretty convincingly recreated (in France) by cinematographer Paul Guilhaume and I think the elements dealing with The Disappeared are genuinely moving. On the performance front, Saldana is an absolute powerhouse as the very adaptable Rita, singing and dancing up a storm – and it’s great to see her performing as a human being rather than as a green-skinned, spandex-clad alien!

As a cis male, I might have missed some of the nuances around the transgender elements of the story – and Gascón certainly delivers a compelling and heartfelt performance – but the process of transition seems to be used here as a metaphor for wiping the slate clean and beginning a new life, untainted by the past. However, the lesson Emilia ultimately learns is that this is impossible, and she has to do more than change the way she lives if she wants to atone for her earlier crimes. This makes the underlying message a little muddled.

But again, I feel I must tip my hat to Jacques Audiard who, at seventy years of age, is fearlessly going where few other directors would dare to tread. Long may he continue to thrive!

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney

15/04/19

The western movie has ridden some twisted trails over the years, but few of them are quite as strange as the one followed by The Sisters Brothers. The first feature in English by French director Jacques Audiard, it’s based on the acclaimed novel by Patrick De Witt. It’s a good deal more philosophical than your average oater and it takes it owns sweet time to relate a decidedly bizarre tale.

The titular brothers are hired guns, working for the mysterious Commodore (a thankless non-speaking role for Rutger Hauer). Eli (John C Reilly) is the shy, sensitive one, who’s clearly not cut out for this kind of work, but is nonetheless deadly with a revolver, whenever push comes to shove. He tends to play second fiddle to the more nihilistic Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), a habitual drunkard, who somehow manages to turn everything he touches into absolute chaos.

For their latest mission, the brothers are despatched to rendezvous with another hired gun, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), in order to apprehend the charismatic Herman Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), a man with a spectacular (and, it would seem, almost magical) secret. But when Morris bumps into Warm, he soon falls under the man’s peculiar spell and the two of them quickly become business partners – a move which makes the brothers’ latest mission even more complicated than they expected.

This is a weirdly metaphorical film, where strange images loom out of mythic landscapes – a film where blazing horses career through the night and chunks of gold shimmer invitingly at the bottom of a creek – where opportunities pop up unexpectedly from the sagebrush only to metamorphose into death traps. As the brothers bicker and quarrel their way across the screen, we begin to learn that they are pioneers of their own misfortune, doomed to keep running from the seemingly endless adversaries that are pitched against them – and, even when they too find themselves partnering with their former target, it is only to unleash more dangers.

The Sisters Brothers certainly won’t be for everyone – and, with a running time of just over two hours, it will try the patience of those who want something more straightforward. But once settled into its peculiar rhythm, I find myself beguiled and occasionally startled by it. This is a Western the like of which I’ve never seen before and, trust me, I’ve seen many. I enjoy the ride.

4 stars

Philip Caveney